741–750 of 873 posts
I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game. Been a little while but I personally played as a goalie myself. The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch. As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you). What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where…
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Most of her friends are probably women. Try making an account with an obvious female name and you will see a marked difference on most social platforms I am saying this as a guy we really don't understand the world women live in online or offline.
I think some of us have a fair idea. And I think both sexes have problems that we could solve but continue to ignore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book) Still a very valid experiment. I know the source of both sex' strife though: competition. I don't think we'll ever solve that, not while we're still monkeys.
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To be fair, back in those "good old phpbb days", people trolled just as hard as anyone does now, and maybe worse, since the consequences of it were not as visible, and getting in trouble for things you said online was virtually nonexistent. Everyone used a fake name, and while it might be possible to dox someone, it wasn't an operational concern for anyone who just wanted to be a jerk...
The trolling that happened on IRC would put modern day trolling to shame. Imagine posting a link to an exe claiming to be one thing but would actually contain Back Orifice (a Trojan that gave you remote access to the victim's pc). People would blindly download exes and run them on completely unprotected Windows 98. To be fair I do miss the "old Internet". Less corporate, money grabbing, more freedom.
I'm an old timer, and I've been there since the beginning. I remember the beginning of the eternal summer, and the gradual decline that came after.
One of my first jobs was actually 3rd shift help desk for a regional dial-up ISP. The people that called were mostly drunk southerner's who, at the time, seemed hopelessly non-technical.
Looking back I now see that any one of them knew much, much more about how the internet actually worked than a the average modern user, and were probably more worldly in general than todays average user.... and there are billions more of them now.
We thought that global access to information would democratize everything and expose people to a higher level of rhetoric and thinking. We just KNEW that the best ideas would rise to the top of discourse naturally and the world would magically become a better place. We were so very wrong. It's turns out that more than cream floats.
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My very vibes-based take is that setting up home servers is the dad jeans of tech hobbies. It's kind of arresting how bewildered many young people are when confronted with anything below the UI layer. I think peak tech savviness happened a bit younger than me: maybe mid-late millennial. After that you start getting into the iPad-from-birth generation for whom tech was rarely a challenge. Tech savviness among young fo…
This is my impression as well. From what I've seen, many Gen Z people only loosely even think in terms of things like "files". They are used to integrations where everything just lives on some website or in a Google app and the way you locate things is by searching.
Although there has also been a softening of math skills among the weakest students, the best students are still quite capable, so the erosion is mostly in tech skills, not analytical skills.
And looking at their site… Hacky creative coding. Mate, AI replaced you like 2 years ago.
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AI SEO is where the attention is going, with ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Google AI Overviews replacing the need for people to visit websites
I don't know why people are down-voting it. You might not like it, you may not think it's good. But this is absolutely happening and there's a lot of data out there about it.
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For $125, which is also about the price of one year of cloud storage, you can get a hard drive big enough to store half a million photos and also back up a million photos. It probably won't ever go over $200. And the hardware to serve that hard drive is somewhere between free and another hundred.
Sure, but then you're putting all your eggs in one basket (hard drive). If you really want to divest yourself of the cloud then you need to set things up in a redundant and fault-tolerant fashion. And at that point the outlay is much more than 'just a hard drive'.
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In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions. Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regula…
I had a very interesting discussion with a friend today, where I was talking to her about the /r/golang thread about Rob Pike's comments to OpenAI and how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots. No idea why the density of bots was so high in that thread, it was kind of absurd to see. Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's…
I am sure there are some dead giveaways, but how can you be sure about that?
What I have experienced is both going into forums/discussions someone said was bots talking to bots, with no real clear indication by any of the many markers I am aware of that it was in fact bots; and also comments calling responses bots seemingly as a manipulative dismissal in response to something that was not the consensus or commonly approved position.
I say that because my impression is that what is happening is a full on breakdown of civic discussion and conversation as a whole. The internet destroyed IRL public forums (pubs/bars, clubs, etc) and the draconian COVID policies took the death knell to many more, and now bots and the seemingly bigger issue of immediate distrust of everything, seems to also be destroying online conversations of all sorts.
Yes, you’ll be able to have small group meetings and maybe even voice/video only conversations, but that brings a whole host of other systems changes with it, especially as mass surveillance long surpassed anything the worst tyrants of history could have ever even dreamed of implementing. It all seems a shift into unhealthy territory as a civilization in general, including since essentially all western governments cannot be trusted by their own people anymore.
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In my anecdotal experience, it's moved to private, trust-based channels: iMessage, WhatsApp, email, face-to-face interactions. Our 30-year bender of putting our lives online and blurring the public and the private has finally ended: people don't want to be online, don't trust social media, don't really trust any media, and are living simple local lives with a small circle of friends that they get together with regula…
I had a very interesting discussion with a friend today, where I was talking to her about the /r/golang thread about Rob Pike's comments to OpenAI and how the thread was full of bots talking with other bots. No idea why the density of bots was so high in that thread, it was kind of absurd to see. Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's…